1995: What is This Internet Thing?!
Armed with an education and work experience in computer hardware and local area networking, Kai came to the University of British Columbia’s ITServices unit in 1995 as a Novell Certified NetWare Engineer (CNE).
While designing, building and maintaining the server / workstation networks for many of UBC’s units and departments, Kai discovered that the University had its own internal “network”, where staff, faculty and students could easily communicate and share information and files across campus, and around the globe.
“I had heard of this Internet thing before, and even had access when internal group email became available to some companies,” says Kai. “But to be able to communicate with someone electronically, from across the street or from halfway around the world?! What is this delicious magic?” Mind blown.
Immediately thereafter, Kai scraped together the funds to build a new PC with a dial-up modem to access the public Internet. At night, he feverishly taught himself HTML and began to create beautiful (some say horrible) HTML 1.0 web pages.